Solar power industry has grown rapidly over the past decade, as more environmentally-conscious countries are advancing renewal energy and conserving earthly resources to combat against global warming and climate change. The urgency to scale back on carbon emissions cannot be overstated, statement which was promulgated in the gathering of leaders around the globe during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 or CMP 11, in Paris, France. The increased use of solar energy is a centerpiece strategy to reduce the reliance on petroleum, along with other several solar initiatives that have been launched.
Constructions of solar farms and solar projects, plus installations of solar panels at offices and residential homes, provide an energy efficient mechanism to absorb the sun rays as a source of energy for generating electricity or heating. A solar module or a photovoltaic (PV) module is a packaged and connected assembly with a matrix of solar cells. Each solar module is rated by its direct current (DC) output power under a set of test conditions. One industrial leading company designing and manufacturing solar cells and solar modules is JA Solar, www.jasolar.com.
Most solar panel installations contain an array of solar modules to supply a greater aggregate amount of power. Like any electrical product, there is a life cycle to electronic circuitry, or sometimes there is a failure in an electrical component. When a solar module becomes defective due to an electrical failure, one current solution is to replace the entire module with a new solar module. Such approach can be expensive, either singularly as a solar module or cumulatively for multiple solar modules. The current “in-module” electronics (IME) is quite fractured and difficult to implement, representing a risk for solar cell and module companies to incorporate IME into their solar modules. Another shortcoming of the conventional solution is that the solar module manufactures are required to customize the output specification of the solar modules depending on the choice of the coupling assembly to the solar modules.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a solar junction box with cost-effective design for replacement of a solar module when the solar junction box becomes defective, as well as flexibility to adapt the solar module to various output coupling wiring specifications.